India has overtaken Russia to claim the third highest number of coronavirus cases in the world after registering nearly 25,000 new infections per day, mainly clustered in the megacities of Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai.
The total number of Covid-19 cases in India rose to 697,413 on Monday, after three consecutive days of record increases in infection. Only Brazil, with 1.6 million, and the US, with 2.88 million, have more cases and experts say the country is still months away from reaching its peak.
The mortality rate in the country of 1,300 million people remains relatively low, with 19,693 deaths, ranking eighth in the world and 2.8%, lower than the world average of 4.7%.
“With the outbreak of cases that occurred in the past week, we are definitely entering a worrying phase of the epidemic,” said Dr. Preeti Kumar, vice president of the Indian Public Health Foundation.
“In India, this is a concentrated epidemic, it is very urban. While rural areas seem to have it under control, the way the virus has exploded in our large, densely populated cities indicates that the epidemic will continue here for some time. “
The megacities of Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai collectively represent around two thirds of the cases in India.
In Delhi, which reached 100,000 cases on Monday, the city’s prime minister, Arvind Kejriwal, said “there was no need to panic.” He said that the number of beds available in the ICU in the capital had increased by 169%. A new expanding medical facility in Delhi, the size of 20 soccer fields, built in a spiritual center, opened its doors this week with capacity for 10,000 mildly symptomatic and asymptomatic patients.
A study by the Indian Council of Medical Research has predicted that India will not peak until mid-November. However, Dr. Randeep Guleria, director of the All India Institute of Medical Science, was more optimistic about Delhi’s prospects. “If the number of cases in Delhi continues to be static or decrease in the coming weeks, and the decrease is at a sustained rate, then we can say that we can break the peak in August,” he said.
However, even with the construction of new facilities, the lack of doctors and healthcare workers is proving problematic across the country as many are becoming infected on the front line or increasingly reluctant to risk exposure.
Last week, testing of Covid-19 samples at three top health institutes in Patna, the capital of Bihar state, had to be closed for three days after 15 doctors, laboratory technicians, and other health workers they tested positive for the virus. The laboratories of the Patna Medical School and Hospital, the Rajendra Memorial Institute of Medical Sciences and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences were closed by fumigation.
Dr. Taha Mateen, managing director of the HBS hospital in Bangalore, said in a video, which went viral over the weekend, that “it had been a virtual bloodbath” in the room, with just him and another willing doctor. to work in coronavirus cases. .
“I have beds, I have oxygen beds, I have fans, I have all the equipment. I have 30 other beds like this, but I don’t have doctors working here, ”Mateen said, asking other doctors to offer their services.
India began to loosen its tight coronavirus blockade in early June, allowing for domestic travel and the opening of shops and restaurants. However, in states like Bihar, which saw the return of millions of migrant workers, there was a 25-fold increase in Covid-19 cases. As more than 3 million migrant workers returned this month, cases in Bihar went from 485 to 12,140.
The southern state of Kerala, which had been celebrated worldwide for its successes in containing the virus, also appeared to be experiencing a further increase in cases, with 193 reported on Monday. The Kerala government ordered a triple shutdown in the state’s largest city, Thiruvananthapuram, after a new state law that made face masks and social distancing mandatory in public spaces for a year until at least 2021.
Plans to reopen India’s most revered and visited monument, the Taj Mahal, in the city of Agra, were also suspended indefinitely. Agra, one of India’s first major virus clusters, remains the worst affected city in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in the country.
However, in the midst of the tragedy, there were small flashes of hope. In Delhi, a 106-year-old man, who had survived the Spanish flu epidemic when he was four years old, was released from the Rajiv Gandhi Super Specialty hospital this week after fully recovering from the coronavirus. “He not only recovered from Covid-19, he recovered faster than his son, who is also very old,” a senior doctor told local media.
Manoj Chaurasia contributed reporting from Patna
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